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awful comet that trails its cold lustre through the remote abysses of
space once a century and interests and instructs a cultivated handful
of astronomers is worth more to the world than the sun which warms and
cheers all the nations every day and makes the crops to grow.
If a critic should start a religion it would not have any object but
to convert angels: and they wouldn't need it. The thin top crust of
humanity--the cultivated--are worth pacifying, worth pleasing, worth
coddling, worth nourishing and preserving with dainties and delicacies,
it is true; but to be caterer to that little faction is no very
dignified or valuable occupation, it seems to me; it is merely feeding
the over-fed, and there must be small satisfaction in that. It is not
that little minority who are already saved that are best worth trying to
uplift, I should think, but the mighty mass of the uncultivated who are
underneath. That mass will never see the Old Masters--that sight is for
the few; but the chromo maker can lift them all one step upward toward
appreciation of art; they cannot have the opera, but the hurdy-gurdy
and the singing class lift them a little way toward that far light; they
will never know Homer, but the passing rhymester of their day leaves
them higher than he found them; they may never even hear of the Latin
classics, but they will strike step with Kipling's drum-beat, and they
will march; for all Jonathan Edwards's help they would die in their
slums, but the Salvation Army will beguile some of them up to pure air
and a cleaner life; they know no sculpture, the Venus is not even a name
to them, but they are a grade higher in the scale of civilization by
the ministrations of the plaster-cast than they were before it took its
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